Juan de Vojníkov wrote:
Hi all,
*snip*
Relationship between Wikibooks and Wikiversity: Well, here I personaly doesnt feel a problem - I mean we can exist separetly. I personaly think, there is a problem on the site of Wikibooks to find their own identity. It would be a nice to get more opinions and ideas of people from Wikibooks, who like to cover Wikiversity by Wikibooks. I think that wikibookians they are affraid of loosing something, but I dont think so, they will lost.
Finally, ir there was set by Cormaggio a problem of the relationship between these to projects it would be probably nice to make another IRC session with people from Wikibooks.
Thats all for me, I am looking forward tomorrow, well have a clear chat.
Regards, Juan
I am so disappointed that this is still an ongoing issue.... or at least perceived as one by some members of the Wikimedia community. That Wikiversity started on Wikibooks is true, and that there has been some sort of "identity crisis" on Wikibooks is also true. I could wax philosophically about why the problems on Wikibooks exist, but it has next to nothing to do with the relationship between Wikibooks and Wikiversity. I thought the VfD on en.wikibooks about Wikiversity made that clear enough, not to mention the large number of thoughts and opinions on this topic found on Meta when Wikiversity started would be sufficient to express the multitude of opinions on what Wikiversity should be.
I will note that there was a very vocal minority (who GerardM apparently is a part of) that were opposed to the creation of Wikiversity from the very beginning. Some of their objections had some very sound philosophical standings, but I'd like to point out that they were a minority opinion at best.
What is frustrating this whole process is more or less the inconsistency that has been applied to Wikiversity vs. other Wikimedia sister projects in terms of project creation, and this is yet another example. The "birth" of the English-language Wikiversity was a huge "fight" in terms of getting it accepted by the Wikimedia community, and I find it unfortunate that we have to keep fighting this same argument over and over again for each new language edition of Wikiversity. The one and only thing IMHO the language committee ought to be involved with is to decide if there is going to be a viable community that can sustain the growth and development of the new language edition. I'm not exactly sure if this is the case for the Greek Wikiversity community, but then again I'm saying simply that "I don't know". I haven't been working with too many in the Greek-language Wikibooks community either to know just how big of a community and how dedicated they may be....which was what a "language committee" was supposed to look into instead of having every Wikimedia community member know about every issue of every Wikimedia project.
As far as the English language Wikibooks and Wikiversity communities are concerned, while there is some overlap (and I hope that is sustained), there are some very different communities involved in each project, and some interesting perspective differences based on some of the "founding principles" that govern each community...and the goals of each community. There are some real differences, which is one of the reasons why there was a separation of the communities in the first place. As to if that was a good idea or not is something worthy of a separate debate, and when Wikiversity was a part of Wikibooks, I didn't really have a huge problem in terms of managing the Wikiversity content. I will say, however, that by becoming a separate project did breathe new life into Wikiversity and allowed a degree of freedom that I didn't see with the project while it was on Wikibooks. At least for the English language edition, there have been many very positive results that have occurred due to Wikiversity becoming independent of Wikibooks. Certainly the growth of content on Wikiversity is something that I don't think would have happened had Wikiversity remained on Wikibooks... but that is from my perspective of having admined Wikibooks for some time. I'm also afraid that some of the "housecleaning" on Wikibooks would have trashed Wikiversity, which thankfully the Wikiversity community never had to confront... again in part due to their being an independent Wikimedia project.
-- Robert Horning